GENEVA, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Uganda could be the next country hit by alarming malnutrition rates due to drought which has already sparked famine in southern Somalia and hunger in Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.

Pockets of food insecurity have already been detected in drought-hit northern areas of Uganda, east Africa's third largest economy, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.

"Uganda may be the next country hit with these same sort of alarming malnutrition and drought conditions," the FAO's Sandra Aviles told a news briefing.

An estimated 815,000 people in drought-prone northern Uganda, mainly in the Karamoja region , currently face moderate food insecurity, corresponding to phase two on a U.N. scale where five means famine, she said.

Prices for maize, Uganda's main crop, went up by 67 percent between June and July due to a delay in the harvest and the effect of greater demand from neighbouring Kenya and southern Sudan, according to Shukri Ahmed, senior economist at the FAO.

"Maize prices are currently almost four times their level of the previous year. That price rise will be an added burden," he told Reuters. "Another factor is the high fuel prices."

But rainfall in the rainy season of September-October is forecast to be average to above average for most of Uganda, he said.

Famine has been declared in two regions of southern Somalia but may soon engulf as many as six more regions of the lawless nation, the U.N. humanitarian chief said on Monday.

Some 12.4 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti are already in dire need of help due to the worst drought in 60 years, U.N. under-secretary-general and emergency relief coordinator Valerie Amos said in New York.

APPEAL TO AIR CARRIERS

The world body appealed on Tuesday to air carriers to provide free or heavily discounted cargo space to transport food to starving children in the region.

"There are over 2.3 million acutely malnourished children in the Horn of Africa. More than half a million will die if they do not get help within weeks," Marixie Mercado of the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said.

Tens of thousands of Somalis have already died from starvation or diseases caused by it, half of them children under age five, the United Nations says.

UNICEF has 5,000 tonnes of therapeutic and supplementary food supplies stored in France, Belgium and Italy, enough to feed 300,000 malnourished children for a month. The agency needs to bring 400 tonnes of supplies to its regional hub in Nairobi each week by air, a costly operation, until it can set up a food pipeline by sea in about 6 weeks.

With therapeutic feeding, a malnourished child can fully recover in 4 to 6 weeks, Mercado said.

British Airways , Lufthansa , UPS and Virgin have offered to transport between 15 to 50 tonnes per week for a limited period, she said.

Cargolux, Europe's largest all-cargo airline, has offered to bring 107 tonnes from Luxembourg to Nairobi, she said.

Experts say the Pacific ocean phenomenon known as La Niña is partly to blame for the drought ravaging the Horn of Africa. But while the latest La Niña episode has ended, climate scientists are concerned about what the next few months will bring and the intensifying effects of a changing global climate. La Niña begins when eastern Pacific waters near the equator turn cooler than normal. A cascade of changes in ocean temperatures and wind currents follows, and the consequences are global.

Droughts and floods

The latest episode began in July of last year. In the United States, altered winds pushed moisture away from the south, causing severe droughts that persist today, and toward the north, causing floods. Half the world away, flooding in Australia this winter was also linked to La Niña, experts say. And in Africa, "The easterly winds that are supposed to bring moisture into East Africa [were] reduced," says meteorologist Wassila Thiaw, head of the Africa desk at the U.S. National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center. "There was less moisture coming into East Africa and therefore rainfall is reduced." Rains that were supposed to fall over Somalia, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya late last year failed.

Lost rainy season

The second rainy season in that part of the Horn of Africa, from March through May, failed, too, but for different reasons, he says. "What played out here during the March-April-May season, we don't think that is really La Niña, but it probably mostly due to the atmospheric conditions that prevailed at that time." He says La Niña's influence on the March-through-May rainy season typically is not as strong as on the October-through-December season. Natural variations in atmospheric conditions were enough to prolong the drought, he says.

Rainy season threatened

This La Niña episode ended in May. But Thiaw says there is a chance another one may begin by the end of this year. "If that happens before the October-through-December rainfall season, then there's a high chance for us to be in another dryer-than- normal season," he says That could be catastrophic for drought-stricken parts of East Africa, he says. But he cautions it is too soon to say whether it will happen, or how severe it would be.

Choosing which child lives, and which child dies...For some, famine means picking which child diesAugust 11, 2011 - Wardo Mohamud Yusuf walked for two weeks with one child on her back when her 4-year-old son collapsed at her side.

The 29-year-old asked the families she was traveling with for help, but they continued on their way. Then she had to make a choice no parent should have to make. Yusuf left her 4-year-old behind. Now at a refugee camp in Kenya, Yusuf says she is reliving the pain of abandoning her son. Parents fleeing Somalia's devastating famine are having to make unimaginably cruel choices: Which children have the best chance to survive when food and water run low? Who should be left behind?

The U.S. estimates that more than 29,000 Somali children under age 5 have died in the country's famine the last three months. At the Kakuma Mission Hospital in northern Kenya, an incident between two mothers illustrates the growing desperation among refugees as a famine in neighboring Somalia that has killed tens of thousands draws an international aid effort. The two mothers exchanged blows as they held their wailing infants in their arms after one of the women tried to cut in the long line for children to receive treatment for severe malnutrition.

The women faced off a second time after passing their children to onlookers amid the melee: The younger woman head-butted the other to the ground before hospital personnel intervened and separated them. "She ordered me to move after she cut the line and I have been here since dawn. I could not let her," said one of the women who only identified herself as Chipure, a mother of eight children, who got a swollen lip from being head-butted. At least five people are reported to have died in Kenya's Turkana region, one of the most remote and marginalized areas in the country, where people depend on herds of animals that are dying from the drought.

According to the U.N. children's agency, a little more than half of the population here consumes just one meal a day. The hunger crisis is so bad that families here are even sharing food supplements given to infants. The temperature here can hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and 20 liters of water costs a third of John Ekidor's daily wage. "The last time I took a bath was a week ago," said Ekidor, 33, who supports his family of eight by panning for gold. "Eating one meal a day is now a matter of chance."

Drought causing the famine...Millions Impacted by Drought in Northern KenyaAugust 11, 2011 - The ongoing drought in northern Kenya has put millions of people in need of immediate food assistance. Many children are at risk of facing the devastating effects of severe malnutrition. But the effects of acute water shortages on families are even more far reaching. They include lifestyle changes in communities experiencing water shortages.

Airlie Taylor, communications officer for ActionAid Internationals International Emergencies and Conflict Team, says that the lack of water is changing the way families live. Weve seen women whose traditional domestic roles have made them the main water collectors, are increasingly being faced with the task of walking farther distances to find water, or spending a lot of time scraping water from shallow wells with water pans.

She said this is taking up a lot more of their time and leaving them less for other things. Taylor said the drought is causing families to break up. We find the men have migrated with their livestock to find water, leaving the women and children at home. So there is a social impact with the drought situation. Its not just about a lack of water and people going hungry, said Taylor.

The ActionAid official said children are among the most vulnerable groups as they are less able of coping with less food and water. She said consequently, the shortages have forced many families to pull their children out of school. Children are being pulled out of school, either because their families are migrating closer to water sources, or because the families have lost their livestock and no longer have a means to make a living, can no longer afford to pay school fees or to pay for school uniforms, said Taylor.

Alarms not bein' answered quick enough...Chatham House report: Famine risks are badly managed5 April 2013 - Famine early warning systems have a good track record of predicting food shortages but are poor at triggering early action, a report has concluded.

The study said the opportunity for early action was being missed by governments and humanitarian agencies. It said the "disconnect" was starkly apparent in Somalia where no action was taken despite 11 months of warnings. Up to two million people are estimated to have died in drought-related emergencies since 1970. The report by UK think-tank Chatham House, Managing Famine Risk: Linking Early Warning to Early Action, looked at the issue of drought-related emergencies on a global scale but focused on the Horn of Africa and the Sahel regions. "The regions are quite unique in a way because you have these droughts, where there are normally successive failed rains; then you have a process whereby you have subsequent harvest failures then people adopt coping strategies," explained report author Rob Bailey. "They start selling off assets, running down food reserves, taking on credit - they get themselves into an increasingly desperate situation."

Despite early warnings, donors seem reluctant to intervene

Mr Bailey, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, said that after a period of time the coping strategies became exhausted, triggering a famine. "But the whole process can take 11 months from start to finish, and that is why there is an opportunity to intervene early," he told BBC News. "Yet despite this very significant opportunity and despite analysis showing that when you do intervene early it costs less and you save more lives, it does not happen."

Gambling with lives

The main reason, he observed, why there was a delay, was a result of perceived political risk by governments. "Ultimately, early action requires government action," he added. "It requires donor governments - like the UK and US - to write a cheque early on before the crisis is at its worse phase, and that is a big ask for governments to do because governments are primarily concerned with managing the political risks to themselves. "They see political risks in funding these sorts of things because budgets are tight and public support for aid spending is less than it used to be, so it is seen as a particularly risky endeavour at the moment." If the early action by donor governments prevented the crisis, that could also cause problems as well because it could be argued that there was not a crisis waiting to happen in the first place.

It is estimated that earlier intervention saves aid budgets about $1,000 per person affected by famine

Mr Bailey cited the 2011 famine in Somalia as an example where the issue of political risk shaped the global response to the humanitarian emergency. "That was not a result of early warning information - it was probably the single most documented and monitored evolution of famine in history," he explained. "But still no early action happened and probably the main reason for that is because the areas of Somalia that were at most risk where under control of a Jihadist militia, which the US and other western donor nations categorise as a terrorist organisation." He added that there was concern among donor nations that carrying out humanitarian missions in those areas could strengthen the position of the militia, especially if aid ended up in the hands of the group.

40% of U.S. corn acres are devoted to producing ethanol. Unneeded and unwanted, save for the agriculture industry. They make so much ethanol that 20% of it is exported.

Our nation's farmers are starving the world in the name of profits. In the process they pollute our groundwater, air, rivers, and streams. And still we hand them billions of dollars of cash year after year.

It's time we called out these fuckers and name them for who they are. Usurpers and rapers of economy and environment.

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